GNU Emacs Alternatives

GNU Emacs Alternatives

GNU Emacs is an extensible and customizable, free and open source text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman and has been dubbed "the most powerful text editor available today". At the core of GNU Emacs is an interpre.. read more.

According to people there are many software similar to it, and the best alternative to GNU Emacs is Vim which is both free and open source. Other highly recommended applications include Atom (Free) , PhpStorm (Commercial) and WebStorm (Commercial).
In total people have suggested 9 alternatives to GNU Emacs that share similarities by use case and feature set.

Vim

Vim dates back all the way to 1991 when Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar released it to the public. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. The software is released as free and open-source software under the Vim License. Vim is often called a "programmer's editor," as it relies more on customization of shortcuts and makes heavy use of macros that can be combined with muscle memory to achieve maximum proficiency. Vim was designed for use in both command-line interfaces and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface.

Free & Open Source
👍 Most people think Vim is a good alternative to GNU Emacs.

Atom

A free and open-source IDE for macOS, Linux, and Windows developed by GitHub Inc. The application is build on the Electron framework and provides a wide eco-system of add-ons that can be used to extend the IDE further. Atom is loved by developers across the globe.

Free & Open Source

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a commercial, cross-platform IDE specifically designed for PHP developers. The IDE provides on-the-fly code analysis, error prevention and automated refactoring for PHP, HTML and JavaScript code. PhpStorm is loved by professional Symfony, Laravel, Drupal, WordPress, Zend Framework, Magento, Joomla!, CakePHP, Yii developers across the globe.

Commercial & Proprietary

WebStorm

WebStorm is a smart JavaScript IDE developed by JetBrains. With WebStorm you can run unit testing and debug tests with Karma, Mocha, Protractor, and Jest. All tests are available in a handy tree-view within the editor itself and can easily be navigated to and inspected. WebStorm also provides intelligent code competition, error detection, powerful navigation and refactoring for JavaScript, TypeScript, stylesheet languages and popular JavaScript frameworks.

Commercial & Proprietary

Geany

A free and open-source lightweight GUI text editor using Scintilla and GTK with basic IDE features. Geany is designed and developed with performance in mind, and provides limited dependency on separate packages or external libraries on Linux. Geany is available for a wide variety of operating systems including BSD, Linux, macOS, Solaris and Windows.

Free & Open Source

UltraEdit

Over 4 million people use UltraEdit for their development needs. UltraEdit is flexible, powerful, and secure text editor that provides powerful and intuitive multi-caret editing and multi-selection capabilities, HTML and Markdown live preview, advanced file and folder search, horizontal editing through column mode and much more. UltraEdit also integrates with FTP, SSH and Telnet, making it easy to push your code to remote servers without CI/CD. The software is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Commercial & Proprietary

RubyMine

With RubyMine you can produce high-quality code more efficiently, thanks to first-class support for Ruby and Rails, JavaScript and CoffeeScript, ERB and HAML, CSS, Sass and Less, and more. RubyMine is IDE specifically designed for the programming language Ruby. It allows developers to take advantage of the language specific-aware syntax & error highlighting, code formatting, code completion, and quick documentation.

Commercial & Proprietary

Visual Studio Code

A free and open source IDE based on Electron and Atom, developed by Microsoft. Visual Studio Code or VS Code is an extensible IDE or coding editor that is loved by many developers around the globe. The editor combines a streamlined UI with advanced code assistance, code nagivation and intellisense.

Free & Open Source

TextWrangler

TextWrangler is an all-purpose text and code editor for macOS. TextWrangler is now BBEdit.

Free & Open Source

How Are These GNU Emacs Alternatives Generated?

Information found on this page is crowd-sourced by the community and contains the most agreed upon GNU Emacs alternatives. You can use this information to find similar software to GNU Emacs for specific platforms with various pricing options and licenses. Anyone that have previously used GNU Emacs can suggest alternatives, vote on the accuracy of other users claims, and help more people in the process of doing so.

This page was last updated on Sun 23 Jan 2022 (3 weeks, 1 day ago).